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China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

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Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#21

Post by jcranmer »

Barrin92 wrote: post #13
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, it sounds like a scare tactic. China does have advantages, mainly, they have lots of data with less concern for privacy. The Chinese are making huge bets on AI, but they are beginning to sound like Japan in the 1980s with their Fifth generation computing project. Actually, there are so many analogues of China today to Japan in the 1980s (huge housing bubble, booming economy that doesn't seem to stop, a huge bet o…

I don't think the comparison to 'neo tokyo' fantasies is warranted. When people were scared of Japan taking over the world with robots, those fifth generation projects were moonshot technologies without any clear commercial application. The difference is that ML today (at least the kind of technologies where China has and is gaining an edge) are deeply embedded in the commercial sector and public security. We're not…

The fifth generation computer was predicated on logic programming being the next big thing. At the time, it wasn't a clearly wrong bet: the AI community was very big on logic programming, and the trend in programming languages was very much from low-level programming to high-level abstractions. The project was announced before the AI winter, after all.

What happened was that advances in scalar processors completely blew the specialized processors out of the water, to the point that general-purpose hardware could implement the desired programming features faster than the dedicated hardware. On top of that, the expert system programming model turned out to be a massive bust. In effect, Japan was suddenly faced with expertise building machines that solved problems no one wanted to solve, and were inferior even at that.

I think that the same risk is equally valid today: it's possible to so focus on one particular aspect of AI that, if the programming model ends up being revolutionized, you're left with useless hardware.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#23

Post by Barrin92 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20
Barrin92 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison to 'neo tokyo' fantasies is warranted. When people were scared of Japan taking over the world with robots, those fifth generation projects were moonshot technologies without any clear commercial application. The difference is that ML today (at least the kind of technologies where China has and is gaining an edge) are deeply embedded in the commercial sector and public security. We're not…

China has no technological edge in ML yet. Even the most ardent supporter talks about how China will have edges in 2020, but not today. It is still very aspirational. I never said anything about neo tokyo, the fifth generation computing project was never vivid in our imaginations, all most of of us remember about it is the government throwing a bunch of money at AI research and hardware, and that it led directly to t…

I don't believe that ML is a talent game at all. I think ML is a data and policy game. There's a lot of talk about AI braininess but from a theoretical standpoint there isn't much new to the currently commercially used ML products. The only thing that's changed over the last five years is data. Backpropagation is decades old.

And on the data and policy side China has hugely favourable conditions. I think we're making a great mistake if we're over-hyping the role of talent.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#24

Post by rayiner »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #6

China's will to move forward is astonishingly great. Remember that in the 70's it was close to a 3rd world nation. In less than 50 years it's challenging the US in technology. Sure a big part of that has been just copying what we already know in terms of technology but I see no slowing down from their part. To become a master at anything 1st you copy and try to match the master once you have matched the master you mo…

You can’t extrapolate trends continuously forward into the future. At the turn of the 20th century Russia was closer in GDP per capita to India and China than to the US. By the 1950s, they beat the US in every space race milestone, and would’ve beaten us to the moon if the head of their space program hadn’t died at an inopportune time. But ultimately it wasn’t sustainable.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#25

Post by propman »

hartator wrote: post #16
yusee wrote: post #7

GMail still can't effectively distinguish between real communication and spam. If China overtakes the US in AI, Schmidt and co. are the folks to blame. They are in the drivers seat of intelligence development, yet their efforts are increasingly scattered, and their only consistent focus is on lobbying government. Dear Alphabet, Please make your products and services work before worrying about geopolitical balance of…

This. What is worrying me is core services seem to perform worst than before like GMail, but even search or YouTube.

Yes! Another thread a while back had a good discussion on this. Gmail, google search and YouTube search have all been terrible last few years. Ever since they started touting ML, I think they started to cut costs and it's been terrible using all 3 services whereas they used to be amazing a few years before.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#26

Post by loverofthings »

pedrosorio wrote: post #5

"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions." In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did th…

I'm pretty sure there's a handful of those that find meaningful work. Then a handful of those that find it in AI.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#28

Post by olympus »

He claims the US government isn't investing in AI. That's false. They're investing in AI, they just aren't giving any money to Google. What would the government do with an AI tuned for advertising? This is likely just Schmidt complaining about not getting free money from the government for once. Besides, it seems like Google is investing plenty of their own money into AI research without the government needing to contribute.

What will kill the US in AI research is when the government starts slapping export controls on everything and preventing foreign nationals from doing top level AI research in the US. Then all the talent will go to other countries.

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#29

Post by kozikow »

Looking at it from different angle than policy and surveillance other comments are focusing on:

- I can't find any concrete data, but it feels like at least 50% of publications on conferences like NIPS or CVPR are made by Chinese nationals. Even if it is initially from USA universities, many researchers are going back, either due to unfavorable Visa situation or else.

- Even among Silicon Valley investors, funds with China roots are relatively much more into AI startups

Re: China Will Overtake the US in AI, said Alphabet's Eric Schmidt

#30

Post by pedrosorio »

AstralStorm wrote: post #17
Chardok wrote: post #9

Yet another US tech billionaire practically fetishizing China for their devotion to technology over people... Sure, I can certainly get behind greater funding for scientific research and education for our benefit, but China is certainly not a country I would like to emulate whatsoever. My biggest question is, what is the meaning and implication of China "dominating" the AI industries? China overtaking the US in milit…

Easy to answer. China has billions of people and is getting exceedingly good at finding enough talent in this huge pool. This is sort of similar in Russia which has the additional advantage of better tuned education system and just as few scruples.

> China has billions of people

Calm down, it hasn't even reached 1.5 billion yet.

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